I love books. I love tea. I love the way they complement each other so well, and want to share. So here is my blog about books and tea - but with a twist. Instead of a traditional book review, I am going to review a book half way through. I won't know the ending - you may or may not know the ending - feel free to laugh at me for being dead wrong, praise me for being bang on, or just be intrigued enough to see how the book ends for yourself! For a little treat enjoy some tea suggestions! WELCOME!

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Sunday, 11 January 2015

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

This book is probably the one that I have been most excited
about in a while. I have always loved fairy tales and when I discovered that
there is an entire sub-genre of adult fiction out there dedicated to the modern
retelling of fairy tales… well, it’s not an exaggeration to say that I may have
swooned. Because there are so many of these books out there, I have decided to
start a little series of these reviews so that I can share this magical world
with you, and hope that it catches your imagination and enchants you like they
have enchanted me.

The particular fairy tale that this story is based on is
actually not one that I am familiar with, which made it more interesting to me.
It’s about an older couple who want desperately, but are unable to have children.
One day they make a child out of snow and then that snow child comes to life
and for a little while fills their lives with love and happiness. One of the
things that I am really appreciating about Eowyn Ivey’s re-telling is that she
talks about the original story; the main character references it when a similar
thing happens to her and her husband. Jack and Mabel are the older childless
couple in this story, recent immigrants to the Alaskan wilderness from
Pennsylvania in the 1920s. After the stillborn birth of their child and years
of internal torment they have decided to try to start their lives over. But as
the old adage goes, you can run away but you still have to take yourself with
you, and life in Alaska is hard and doesn’t help to ease the couples suffering.

Silence and depression seem to be Jack and Mabel’s constant
companions out in the woods and so when an impromptu snowball fight erupts
between the two of them one night, the joy it brings is a wonderful change.
They start to build a snowman and without any sort of external communication
that snowman starts to resemble a small girl with Mabel adding some mittens and
a scarf as a final touch. It seems that night that the broken pieces of Jacks
and Mabel’s lives may finally start to be mended, but the tale takes an
interesting turn when the next day their snow child has been ruined, the
mittens and scarf are missing and they both swear they have seen a small child
running through the woods.

I don’t want to give too much away so I’ll hold off on the synopsis
there. I’ve been finding with these midpoint reviews that there are mostly two
types of books – ones that the story progresses linearly and mostly straight
forward and I can kind of see what going to happen and where the story is going;
and the other ones where I have no idea what’s going to happen and the second
half of the book throws everything on its head. Sometimes this doesn’t happen
dramatically, but the impact is the same. I think this story is going to be one
of the latter ones. When the mysterious child appears Mabel remembers a story
she was told as a child about The Snow Child. As I mentioned before, this is
something that I really appreciate and also find completely fascinating. I
wouldn’t begin to presume Ivey’s reason for doing this, but to me it grounds
the story, Ivey is acknowledging that something fantastical is happening which
allows one to believe that it could happen to you; that if you want something
desperately enough it can happen. It might not be the way you want or expect it
to be, but still, it could happen. Ivey has also done a brilliant job of
keeping all her cards to her chest. At this point in the story you don’t really
know what’s going on. There is a somewhat plausible explanation for the
mysterious child’s existence and also a fantastical one; when Jack and Mabel
talk with the child there is no quotation marks, yet when they talk amongst
themselves or others, there are. Any sort of proof that the child exists seems
to disappear before it can be seen by others, but at the same time there are
tangible reasons to believe that the child is real; so I really have no idea
what’s going on!

Ivey also does a wonderful job of making you feel the
loneliness and isolation of the Alaskan wilderness; which is probably in part
because she lives there, but mostly she is a wonderful writer. She completely
captures the cold and the fear of not making it through the winters as well as
how important it is for the community to come together so that they can all
survive.

I’m glad that I chose this story as my first fairy tale. It’s
brutal and beautiful; and even though I am only halfway through I recommend
this book to anyone who has ever wanted to believe in magic!

I think a good tea to drink with this book would be Teavana's Gingerbread Tea. It tastes just like gingerbread which is a perfect companion for reading a fairy tale on a cold winter's day.